Wood & Wool

Tomorrow, Jan & I are exhibiting at this:

So I have been very busy making things, which also happens to be What I Mostly Did On My Holidays

Everything at the exhibition has to be made from materials which have been locally grown.  Typically, I’m very low on our own Blue-faced Leicester fibre, so I’ve been spinning what are, essentially, floor-sweepings; the left over bits which weren’t good enough to go in fibre-packs in the shop:

which actually came out all right!  It got wound using my beautiful yew nostepinne from P&M and then it turned into baby socks:

I repeated this process a few times:

The blue ones on the right aren’t for the show.  The adult ones are made with Jeni’s self-striping BFL and the baby ones from her BLF/silk fibre which I spun a while ago.

I also started making some flowers from Jan’s mohair.  There’s a basketful now.

I needed to make some scarves.  Anyone who has visited me will know that Johnby Bank is actually baskets of wool surrounded by a house.   This is all very pretty but there’s a disadvantage.  I hadn’t touched my mohair basket for a while and it seemed a bit dusty.  So I washed it, which turned out to be very pretty too:

Then I made the scarves:

I got fed up with broomstick crochet after a while, because it requires Posture.  So I decided to knit some scarves too.  Hurrah for Barbara G. Walker!  Two lovely patterns from her second Treasury both on the same page even!

This is Seafoam.  It’s basically garter stitch with an increasing & decreasing number of yos which make the diamond-shaped loopy bits.

And this has become my favourite pattern of the moment!  It’s essentially k2, p2 rib.  But in between every other k2, you put a yo.  Then you knit the knits & purl the purls until the sixth row, when you put a yo between the k2s which didn’t have one last time and (this is the good bit!) you drop the middle knit stitch where you have k3 and frog it down to the yo six rows down.  This is immensely satisfying!  At the top of the picture is a knitting needle pointing to a yo waiting for action.  Here’s a close-up:

We’ll be taking lots of yarn & fleece too.  I just had time for a few hanks of hand-spun laceweight mohair.  I like the green one best; it could make a scarf for a mermaid:

Now it all just needs labelling!

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